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polsci-101110-self-ordering-world.vtt
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WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000
Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization.
00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:16.000
Okay, we'll cut that off and tell you that the following show does present the viewpoints of its participants.
00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:20.000
The following program represents the view of its participants and
00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:29.000
That's just what I was saying and does not necessarily represent an official opinion of WMRW or any other person or organization.
00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:37.000
And you are listening to WMRW and Politics and Science with your host John Barkasin.
00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:41.000
And my guest today is Dr. Raymond Peat.
00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:45.000
And I'm happy to have him back again.
00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:48.000
And Dr. Peat, can you hear me?
00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:49.000
Yeah.
00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:50.000
Excellent.
00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:53.000
We're going to talk about your recent newsletter.
00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:59.000
It was entitled How Do You Know? Students, Patients, and Discovery.
00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:03.000
And the scope of the newsletter, I thought, was pretty enormous.
00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:13.000
It ranges from discussing a unifying self-ordering principle concerning the nature of the universe, which you can't get much bigger than that,
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and talks about how the same principle is reflected in our learning processes, in our culture, and in all other functional goal-directed systems in our world.
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You use the quote, "One thought fills immensity" by William Blake, the motto of the newsletter.
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And I thought that's very apt for this newsletter because it's such a profound subject you're bringing up.
00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:51.000
And I thought just as a way to bring people into this, it would be useful if you could tell us some of your personal experience as a student and then as a teacher,
00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:55.000
and how this has formed your outlook toward the world.
00:01:55.000 --> 00:02:01.000
My parents had quite a few interesting books.
00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:11.000
I got some from their parents, 19th century books like, I think it was a second or third edition of Darwin's Descent of Man.
00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:20.000
And they had a little collection of the Little Blue Books that were published, I think, in Kansas.
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And they were the classics in five and ten cent versions.
00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:33.000
There really was quite a variety of reading material when I was a little kid.
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And in encyclopedias, the older Encyclopedia Britannica and others, were pretty objective at that time on issues like Darwin versus Lamarck.
00:02:48.000 --> 00:03:17.000
And gave the research done in the early part of the 20th century in different countries that gave me an orientation that I began preferring the non-genetic version of the adaptation of individuals to the environment.
00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:29.000
And so by the late 1940s, when the genetics doctrine was being imposed politically very powerfully through the US,
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that made me start seeing the political significance of science in general, and especially biology.
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Can you give us some sense of time? What year were you reading the Little Blue Books?
00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:55.000
Oh, right after I learned to read Aliaupe and such, I went right to the Little Blue Books, probably 1940.
00:03:55.000 --> 00:04:15.000
And then all through the 40s, my parents knew about Peter Kropotkin's political writings as well as his mutual aid, The Factor of Evolution.
00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:27.000
And so that was my first political book, was really Kropotkin's biological work on evolution.
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And from that he drew his anarchist political ideas.
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And that fit in with the other stuff I had been reading on the true Darwin, not the pseudo-Darwinism that was promoted after the 1940s.
00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:03.000
Neo-Darwinism really was pretty much anti-Darwin.
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In Darwin's introduction to The Descent of Man, he pointed out that his ideas were being distorted,
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and that he didn't say that the struggle for survival and natural selection was the basic power of evolution.
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He named several other more Lamarckian factors in evolution.
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That's more in line with what Kropotkin was saying.
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Yeah. Kropotkin emphasized cooperation within species and even between species in symbiosis and such.
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So I was interested in science before I went to college.
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Even by the time I was in college, I was convinced that there was really something wrong with American and British science in particular.
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And so I concentrated on the humanities and did my master's thesis on Bogeyman's Plague.
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And that gave me a chance to spend years reading on the history of philosophy and philosophy of science and so on.
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So when I, years later, finally did go back to a degree in science,
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I had sort of inoculated myself against being indoctrinated and forced to believe the very dogmatic ideas that make up American science.
00:06:49.000 --> 00:06:56.000
What gave you the clue that it was dogmatic and not based in actuality?
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Oh, you hear the joke about Aristotle having counted the number of teeth in a donk or something and that being repeated for hundreds of years.
00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:18.000
The same thing happened in American chromosome study.
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Even though Germans were able to count and investigate the effects of chromosomes way back in the early 20th century,
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they were thinking of chromosomes as the carriers of heredity and disturbances in chromosomes as being the cause of cancer and so on.
00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:54.000
Major American biologists didn't even believe that chromosomes had to do with heredity until the early 1920s.
00:07:54.000 --> 00:08:01.000
And in the 1940s, well, all the way up until 1956,
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Americans and English were still saying that humans have 48 chromosomes.
00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:17.000
And I had read enough in the 40s to know that people vary somewhat in their numbers,
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but by far the most common number of chromosomes was 46 in normal humans.
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And somehow, as this fixed idea once said, it was with great authority.
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So Americans and British just kept saying it over and over for decades.
00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:46.000
Did you have some good teachers yourself personally going through the school system?
00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:58.000
Oh, yeah, I had three good teachers, I think, in the 19 years in college, university, out of about 60, I guess.
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I don't think that's a bad average as from my own personal experience.
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Yeah.
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Probably did pretty well there.
00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:14.000
You've been teaching, I'd say, and you're still teaching at this point.
00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:24.000
I was reading in a newsletter, and I should have said that Ray Peat is a physiologist and a science historian,
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and I think also going with that is a philosophy historian.
00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:34.000
You write in this newsletter, "How do you know about teaching literature?"
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And I was wondering if you could just recount your experience trying to follow the school regulations
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and then finally giving up on that.
00:09:42.000 --> 00:09:48.000
That year I was teaching two different kinds of composition.
00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:57.000
In freshman composition, the department had a little list of how we had to grade the paper.
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Three types, grammatical or spelling mistakes or dictums.
00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:13.000
You would mark off so many points, and the purpose was to fail about 90% of the freshmen,
00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:17.000
and that was called keeping up the standard.
00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:24.000
And I saw that after doing that for a few weeks that the students were writing worse and worse
00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:38.000
because they thought that they tended to make mistakes when they didn't have everything under very constant control.
00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:42.000
So they started writing like first graders.
00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:56.000
And I had to read several dozen of their papers to save myself the suffering of reading first grade papers.
00:10:56.000 --> 00:11:07.000
I told them that I would from then on ignore the spelling, punctuation, and the things on that list,
00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:17.000
but that I would grade them entirely on their ability to communicate something of interest to me.
00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:23.000
Within just a couple of weeks, everyone was writing much better.
00:11:23.000 --> 00:11:31.000
I had my office partner who was teaching similar classes following the same rules.
00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:38.000
I had to read some of the before and after papers and grade them.
00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:50.000
And he found that when I wasn't grading for errors, the students were writing better according to his and the department's standards.
00:11:50.000 --> 00:12:03.000
So they were supposedly keeping up standards while actually degrading the work output of the students.
00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:10.000
Yeah, that sounds like a dysfunctional system, and I'm glad you were able to find a solution to that.
00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:17.000
Ray, we just got an email, and I think it's true that saying that your voice is being clipped all the time.
00:12:17.000 --> 00:12:23.000
So I think we should probably hang up, and I'll try to reconnect with you and get a better connection.
00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:24.000
Okay.
00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:26.000
So I'll call you right back in about a minute.
00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:27.000
Okay.
00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:33.000
Okay, sorry about that.
00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:56.000
We are going to go to a song for just a second, and I'm going to call Ray back.
00:12:56.000 --> 00:12:58.000
All right, we're back.
00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:01.000
Politics and Science with Dr. Raymond Peat.
00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:11.000
We were talking about your teaching experience and how you actually let the students write about things that were important to them.
00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:18.000
And suddenly their performance improved, even on the grammatical criteria that the college was so worried about.
00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:19.000
Is that right?
00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:21.000
Yeah.
00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:28.000
And when I asked them to put their emphasis on communicating something and to not think about the mechanics of it,
00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:35.000
suddenly the mechanics improved as well as the content.
00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:41.000
And did you know about Carl Rogers at that point, or is that somebody you read about later?
00:13:41.000 --> 00:13:43.000
Were you influenced by him?
00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:56.000
For a while I was majoring in psychology in the 1950s, and I read his client-centered therapy sometime in the late '50s.
00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:02.000
What was his influence on education, Carl Rogers?
00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:15.000
He went from his work showing that it's the coherent personality of the therapist that makes a difference in therapy situations
00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:29.000
and not any psychiatric technique that they might apply, simply the validity of their communication with the client.
00:14:29.000 --> 00:14:40.000
He established that that was actually the thing that made psychological therapy work,
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and then he extended that and began popularizing the idea of student-standard education.
00:14:53.000 --> 00:15:05.000
So it was actually the psychiatrist or therapist allowing the person to self-direct their own recovery, emotional recovery, that was working?
00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:18.000
Yeah, it was the process of listening deeply that the patient in effect began hearing what they were saying themselves
00:15:18.000 --> 00:15:23.000
by having someone understand what they were saying.
00:15:23.000 --> 00:15:30.000
And he also applied the same idea, it seemed like, to the entire world.
00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:33.000
He talked about it in terms of culture?
00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:41.000
Yeah, he published a book on the philosophy of science with a co-author whose name I forget,
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but it's probably a good introduction to Carl Rogers' work to start at the philosophy of science.
00:15:50.000 --> 00:16:06.000
But at the end of his book, "Client-Centered Therapy," there's a philosophical section that makes very explicit the philosophy behind the method.
00:16:06.000 --> 00:16:07.000
And how was he received?
00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:25.000
Oh, well, even other psychiatrists, since he showed empirically that people recovered in proportion to the coherence of the therapist's personality
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and manner of communication and that it had nothing to do with whether they were a Freudian or a behaviorist or whatever.
00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:48.000
And so all of the doctrinaire psychologists said that isn't possible because they really believe in their theories of therapy.
00:16:48.000 --> 00:17:06.000
And especially the medical psychiatrists just totally said he isn't even a psychologist and much less a psychiatrist.
00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:11.000
The medical people were the most rejecting of his approach.
00:17:11.000 --> 00:17:18.000
Considering what he was saying, that's not too surprising because it sounds like it was threatening to them.
00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:33.000
Yeah, and professors in general didn't like that approach because the point of being a professor is to demonstrate that you know it all.
00:17:33.000 --> 00:17:53.000
If a person goes into, say, a physics class, the assumption is that the professor is going to sort of transmit bit by bit his textbook in physics
00:17:53.000 --> 00:18:03.000
into the mind of the student so that it's an absolute filling up of an empty space in the mind of the student
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and as if the professor knows everything for sure and absolutely.
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Back at that time when I was teaching English and literature and studying a variety of things,
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I talked to quite a variety of physics people because that was one of my interests,
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how physics underlies biology, which underlies the way we make language and how consciousness works.
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So as part of my understanding of language and consciousness, I felt I had to have satisfaction that there was some rational physics behind it.
00:18:55.000 --> 00:19:06.000
So I talked to a lot of physics professionals and invariably when I would ask them a question,
00:19:06.000 --> 00:19:14.000
they would quote verb word for word right out of their textbook or physics course
00:19:14.000 --> 00:19:29.000
and simply couldn't conceive what I was asking if it was an attempt to know anything other than what is in the physics book.
00:19:29.000 --> 00:19:36.000
Really the most dogmatic people in science seem to be in physics.
00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:47.000
One of my professors that I thought was intelligent said that the average physics graduate student
00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:57.000
has trouble knowing whether a ball will roll up or down an inclined plane because they've been trained so abstractly.
00:19:57.000 --> 00:20:00.000
That's a little discouraging.
00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:13.000
The physicists who tend towards the mathematical side dislike applied mathematics.
00:20:13.000 --> 00:20:17.000
I've talked to some of those.
00:20:17.000 --> 00:20:27.000
One of the local professors who was very famous explained some physical reactions,
00:20:27.000 --> 00:20:43.000
particle, nuclear particle interactions as being explainable by a particle coming from the future
00:20:43.000 --> 00:20:51.000
and meeting the nucleus at the moment that the nucleus emits a particle.
00:20:51.000 --> 00:21:02.000
Just a most fundamentally confused person who thought time could run both ways at the same time.
00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:09.000
Well, it's perhaps the influence of quantum physics on the scientific culture.
00:21:09.000 --> 00:21:15.000
Yeah, it's the abstract way everything is taught.
00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:26.000
Even getting someone to look at the history of where the idea of quantum thinking came from
00:21:26.000 --> 00:21:32.000
as a historical and cultural thing.
00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:41.000
There have been a couple of books treating the German physics community at that time
00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:50.000
and showing how important idealistic philosophy was in their cultural context.
00:21:50.000 --> 00:22:04.000
When you look at, for example, Einstein's photoelectric theory, at the time that Einstein thought of
00:22:04.000 --> 00:22:14.000
the necessity to quantize light to explain the way a certain frequency of light rather than intensity
00:22:14.000 --> 00:22:20.000
is needed to liberate electrons, at the time he thought that,
00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:28.000
he was absolutely and simply mistaken about the electronic nature of matter.
00:22:28.000 --> 00:22:37.000
Twenty or thirty years later, he learned otherwise, but at that time he subscribed to the idea that
00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:48.000
matter is an assemblage of atomic particles, each one of which is electrically discreet
00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:55.000
and that there is no electrical blurring across the substance.
00:22:55.000 --> 00:23:02.000
When Michael Polanyi, in 1915, coming from Hungary,
00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:16.000
presented in Berlin a description of his work in absorption of gases onto solid surfaces under pressure,
00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:22.000
Einstein was one of the people at the meeting that said, "Sorry, that isn't possible.
00:23:22.000 --> 00:23:31.000
You're thinking in some kind of primitive Hungarian way, but here in Germany we know that
00:23:31.000 --> 00:23:42.000
electrons are discreetly attached to atoms and you don't get these things smearing out through space."
00:23:42.000 --> 00:23:52.000
And it was that kind of thinking that was background to the quantized physics that took over the world,
00:23:52.000 --> 00:24:02.000
and Einstein, who was very instrumental in it, was simply mistaken about how matter works.
00:24:02.000 --> 00:24:06.000
I see. So even great minds can go astray.
00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:11.000
Did he try to call it back when he realized his error?
00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:26.000
Yeah, it was about 1930 or so when the absorption people, they never admitted that Polanyi was right,
00:24:26.000 --> 00:24:37.000
but they started creating alternative ways to explain the experimental evidence that he had demonstrated.
00:24:37.000 --> 00:24:45.000
So Polanyi's evidence was vindicated, but they told a different story about how it worked,
00:24:45.000 --> 00:25:00.000
and from about that time on, Einstein began saying he couldn't really accept the whole quantum approach to physical reality.
00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:09.000
I see. We're talking to Dr. Raymond Peat, who's a physiologist, and Eugene Weirgon, a science historian,
00:25:09.000 --> 00:25:20.000
and it sounds like that's an example of how dogma gets legs of its own and walks off from even the people who originated the ideas.
00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:27.000
And we're also talking about learning and how it works best if it's self-organizing.
00:25:27.000 --> 00:25:34.000
And Carl Rogers was postulating that that's an essential trait of everything in nature,
00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:43.000
that things tend to be self-organizing and they tend to try to live up to their fullest potential.
00:25:43.000 --> 00:25:58.000
Well, it's in the biological idea of what a cell and an organism is where you see the greatest,
00:25:58.000 --> 00:26:10.000
the clearest demonstration of that principle in sociology and therapy and so on.
00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:25.000
People think those aren't really very scientific anyway, and in physics the dogma is so strong that there's no possibility really to talk sensibly to the believers.
00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:42.000
But in biology there has been such a huge amount of data accumulated showing that things are open and flexible
00:26:42.000 --> 00:26:55.000
and that trying to explain them in terms of these quantized eternal parts just doesn't work.
00:26:55.000 --> 00:27:03.000
But that's where molecular biology and the dominant theory of genetics came from,
00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:21.000
a belief in an otherworldly nature of the gene, that what they were doing was agreeing with the theological rejection of evolution.
00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:36.000
And Mendel was a monk who gained his own professional standing by seeming to have disproved evolution
00:27:36.000 --> 00:27:43.000
by showing that traits are eternal even though the organism seemed to change.
00:27:43.000 --> 00:27:49.000
He showed that they're only changing their appearance, but their essential nature is timeless.
00:27:49.000 --> 00:28:00.000
So the church people liked Mendel's work, but then English biologists found it and took it up again for the same reason,
00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:07.000
that they hated some of the things that Darwin said which agreed with Lamarck,
00:28:07.000 --> 00:28:13.000
which was that organisms can be changed by their experience.
00:28:13.000 --> 00:28:27.000
And that has racial overtones. If you say that working class people can radically change their nature and become philosophers,
00:28:27.000 --> 00:28:35.000
that messes with the whole authoritarian social system.
00:28:35.000 --> 00:28:48.000
And so the English ruling class biologists loved the Mendelian approach because it said Darwin and Lamarck
00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:55.000
were both profoundly mistaken about how evolution worked.
00:28:55.000 --> 00:29:00.000
That's fascinating. So really genetics just grew out of a way,
00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:06.000
scientists found a way to appease the church who didn't like the idea of evolution,
00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:11.000
but genes represented something eternal that God could create.
00:29:11.000 --> 00:29:18.000
Yeah, one of the things in the 50s that made me think American biology was ridiculous
00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:28.000
was that they believed that genes would specify everything, including the way we thought
00:29:28.000 --> 00:29:37.000
and the way each synapse, every nerve cell was supposed to be genetically determined as to location
00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:42.000
and the way it synapsed with other nerves.
00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:51.000
And someone calculated how impossible, when they realized how many brain cells there were,
00:29:51.000 --> 00:30:03.000
people started rethinking that and said it wouldn't be possible to have enough genes in a cell to specify how it works.
00:30:03.000 --> 00:30:17.000
And as the genetic people learned more about DNA, it turned out that the great bulk of the DNA isn't there for genetic purposes.
00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:28.000
The genes that make up a person or a yeast are a very small part of the DNA that's present.
00:30:28.000 --> 00:30:36.000
Our DNA isn't very different from that of a monkey or a yeast cell,
00:30:36.000 --> 00:30:41.000
but something is very different in our reality.
00:30:41.000 --> 00:30:48.000
It sounds like it's not just a prejudice among educators and other therapists against the self-ordering idea,
00:30:48.000 --> 00:30:53.000
but that it goes across all the professional trades.
00:30:53.000 --> 00:31:00.000
Yeah, I happen to be teaching a linguistics course in the 60s,
00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:12.000
and just about the time that Noam Chomsky was coming out against the Vietnam War,
00:31:12.000 --> 00:31:23.000
I had been pointing out how there was absolutely no evidence in Chomsky's type of linguistics.
00:31:23.000 --> 00:31:27.000
He totally ignored evidence.
00:31:27.000 --> 00:31:38.000
He used an absolutely idealistic doctrine, saying that we have genes that specify the way we talk.
00:31:38.000 --> 00:31:48.000
And there's almost no difference in Chomsky's idealistic genetic idea of language
00:31:48.000 --> 00:31:55.000
and Conrad Lorenz's genetic explanation for all behavior,
00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:07.000
which Conrad Lorenz designed specifically for Hitler to justify racial extermination.
00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:11.000
Chomsky wouldn't like that comparison,
00:32:11.000 --> 00:32:19.000
but in fact they're both committed to ignoring the actual evidence
00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:25.000
and believing that genes explain everything.
00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:29.000
I'm not sure where Chomsky's motive came from,
00:32:29.000 --> 00:32:38.000
but Lorenz's was obviously to say that society is constituted the way it should be,
00:32:38.000 --> 00:32:44.000
except for the mongrels with the bad genetic traits,
00:32:44.000 --> 00:32:55.000
such as liking jazz music and things that were culturally unpopular and should be exterminated.
00:32:55.000 --> 00:33:02.000
I must admit I'm a little confused because I hear the dogmatists saying that
00:33:02.000 --> 00:33:06.000
everything is laid out and determined by genes,
00:33:06.000 --> 00:33:11.000
and yet they also, which seems like something that's completely set in stone,
00:33:11.000 --> 00:33:15.000
and yet they're also proposing things like chaos theory.
00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:29.000
Yeah, that was the idea of randomness goes way back into the 19th century.
00:33:29.000 --> 00:33:34.000
It was sort of a compromise.
00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:39.000
That if anything changes, it changes only randomly.
00:33:39.000 --> 00:33:51.000
And so when Muller started showing that he could mutate fruit flies with x-rays,
00:33:51.000 --> 00:33:58.000
the change was seen to deteriorate almost always.
00:33:58.000 --> 00:34:02.000
Any mutation made the animals defective.
00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:07.000
And that was because change is random.
00:34:07.000 --> 00:34:14.000
And so if you're going to have change, it can't be meaningful.
00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:20.000
You can't say that if you feed poor people that they will have healthier babies
00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:22.000
who will be more intelligent,
00:34:22.000 --> 00:34:31.000
because that would say that you have a directional change being caused by the environment.
00:34:31.000 --> 00:34:41.000
The whole point of genetics is to say environment can't change the reality of the organism.
00:34:41.000 --> 00:34:46.000
And if you change it, it's only going to make it worse.
00:34:46.000 --> 00:34:53.000
So don't bother trying to improve the traits of a population.
00:34:53.000 --> 00:34:58.000
I see. So it really is political, not only a theological response,
00:34:58.000 --> 00:35:01.000
but a political response.
00:35:01.000 --> 00:35:11.000
Yeah, I think the doctrine of randomness led into this loving of chaos theory.
00:35:11.000 --> 00:35:18.000
You said that neo-Kantian philosophy has dominated U.S. universities for more than a century.
00:35:18.000 --> 00:35:24.000
And it argues that our senses are limited, so we can't really know the world.
00:35:24.000 --> 00:35:27.000
Does that tie into that?
00:35:27.000 --> 00:35:32.000
Yeah, our senses are determined by our genes.
00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:40.000
And even for the Chomsky point of view, and a lot of the biologists,
00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:48.000
even our thought and behaviors are determined by our genes.
00:35:48.000 --> 00:35:53.000
You were talking about Chomsky, and he's famous for theorizing about languages.
00:35:53.000 --> 00:35:58.000
How do languages fit into how we learn?
00:35:58.000 --> 00:36:07.000
Chomsky says that we really don't learn our language in the structural sense that we're born with it.
00:36:07.000 --> 00:36:20.000
All we do is learn some of the minor details of vocabulary and pronunciation and such from our culture.
00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:37.000
The neo-Kantians at the extreme say that our perceptions are shaped by our genes.
00:36:37.000 --> 00:36:44.000
Many of them revive the Leibnizian idea of monads,
00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:51.000
that all of our knowledge and experience is in our genes,
00:36:51.000 --> 00:36:58.000
and so we aren't really experiencing anything.
00:36:58.000 --> 00:37:09.000
George Wald, who was a famous professor who investigated vision,
00:37:09.000 --> 00:37:19.000
he explained that color vision is based on the difference of frequencies rather than an absolute color.
00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:30.000
And he, by testing people who had had their lens removed from their eyes because of cataract,
00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:38.000
he found that they could see patterns in ultraviolet light the same way bees can.
00:37:38.000 --> 00:37:43.000
And that's one of the favorite examples of the neo-Kantians,
00:37:43.000 --> 00:37:48.000
that we are determined to see the world in a certain way.
00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:56.000
For example, bees see a pattern in flowers reflecting ultraviolet light that humans don't see.
00:37:56.000 --> 00:38:04.000
But when the thick lens is removed from the eye, the ultraviolet light gets to our retina,
00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:08.000
and humans can see it.
00:38:08.000 --> 00:38:14.000
So it's just a matter of the intensity of stimulus and such that makes the difference
00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:19.000
between what a bee sees and what a human sees.
00:38:19.000 --> 00:38:26.000
And very similar things apply to how we think about the senses.
00:38:26.000 --> 00:38:37.000
Some people say that bees and birds and other animals, each has its genetically programmed way of thinking
00:38:37.000 --> 00:38:47.000
about what it experiences, and so we can never really know what a bee or an ant is thinking
00:38:47.000 --> 00:38:52.000
because they are only following genetic rules.
00:38:52.000 --> 00:39:02.000
But people who really are willing to look at the animals in their natural setting,
00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:08.000
and in other words, who are studying them in an intelligent way,
00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:15.000
see that the bees and the ants are solving problems, unique, original problems
00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:24.000
that have never happened before in a manner that rivals human thinking.
00:39:24.000 --> 00:39:36.000
For example, given a setup of instructions and arrangements in space,
00:39:36.000 --> 00:39:46.000
ants were able to learn and transmit information as competently as trained air traffic controllers
00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:53.000
in discretely defined informational situations.
00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:04.000
There are lots of demonstrations that show that animal thinking isn't genetically determined
00:40:04.000 --> 00:40:13.000
and unconscious, but behaves almost identically to the way human thinking works,
00:40:13.000 --> 00:40:19.000
perceiving the situation, analyzing it, and communicating it.
00:40:19.000 --> 00:40:24.000
I've never understood why we separated ourselves from the animals to begin with,
00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:27.000
because it just seems like another form of elitism.
00:40:27.000 --> 00:40:37.000
It's obvious that we're very related to all the other beings on this earth, especially mammals.
00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:45.000
It seemed like some insecure elitism that drove us to put us on a pedestal.
00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:53.000
Yeah, just a few decades ago, some of the most famous professors in the country
00:40:53.000 --> 00:41:01.000
were saying that there are subhumans and real humans,
00:41:01.000 --> 00:41:05.000
and that working class people are genetically inferior,
00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:17.000
and that with an improved society, there won't be any exceptions to the stratification,
00:41:17.000 --> 00:41:24.000
and so that working class people will all go to the bottom genetically,
00:41:24.000 --> 00:41:31.000
and that the talented people will all rise to the top,
00:41:31.000 --> 00:41:40.000
that people will never change status once the society sorts things out,
00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:47.000
so that poor people will never try to get a college education.
00:41:47.000 --> 00:41:50.000
So it's kind of like the old European world attitude,
00:41:50.000 --> 00:42:00.000
where people are relegated into their careers at a very young age by how they test in schools.
00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:09.000
Yeah, wasn't the bell curve co-authored by Herrnstein and Murray?
00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:18.000
Yeah, Herrstein was a famous Harvard professor who said that we needed a proper meritocracy,
00:42:18.000 --> 00:42:28.000
where there wasn't the confusion of trying to educate working class people.
00:42:28.000 --> 00:42:32.000
Yeah, well it sounds like the same system that you were teaching in,
00:42:32.000 --> 00:42:37.000
where they wanted to eliminate a certain number of the students from the student body by the time the course was done.
00:42:37.000 --> 00:42:42.000
So it's more of a filter than an education device.
00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:49.000
Ray, I was wondering if you could address some of the other aspects of the article you recently wrote,
00:42:49.000 --> 00:42:53.000
the newsletter, How Do You Know? Students, Patients, and Discovery.
00:42:53.000 --> 00:43:02.000
You talked about Alfred Korzybski, I believe, and also Paolo Freire,
00:43:02.000 --> 00:43:08.000
both pointing out the use of language and the use of abstractions in education,
00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:12.000
and how that's a help and a hindrance.
00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:21.000
Yeah, Paolo Freire was a person who had an empirical view of reality,
00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:30.000
and that when people realized that they could define the words of their language,
00:43:30.000 --> 00:43:43.000
it caused them to start thinking rather than simply accepting what their betters wanted to impose on them.
00:43:43.000 --> 00:43:56.000
So he asked people to choose a vocabulary that they wanted to investigate and to define the terms themselves,
00:43:56.000 --> 00:44:05.000
and then to test their definitions, and a true empirical approach to reality.
00:44:05.000 --> 00:44:21.000
And Korzybski pretty much got stuck in the idea that there were gradients of concreteness and generality,
00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:30.000
and that truth involved getting down to the specific concrete fact.
00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:45.000
And he was basically an enemy of the idea that there could be a critical approach on the general level,
00:44:45.000 --> 00:45:01.000
and that general perceptions and concepts were ultimately just as valid as concrete naming of individual situations.
00:45:01.000 --> 00:45:07.000
He wanted the proper scientific language.
00:45:07.000 --> 00:45:21.000
He wanted it to have a coefficient or diacritical mark indicating the particular individual and the particular time you're referring to,
00:45:21.000 --> 00:45:28.000
and implying that generalities were always farther from reality.
00:45:28.000 --> 00:45:44.000
If you realize that all of the facts are, whether you're talking about an atom, here and now, an organism, or a process,
00:45:44.000 --> 00:45:49.000
we're talking about patterns of experience.
00:45:49.000 --> 00:46:00.000
And if a person doesn't look for a pattern on the scale of generality, naturally they're not going to find it.
00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:08.000
And it's the same thing as assuming that everything an ant does is stupid.
00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:18.000
Like the famous E.O. Wilson, I think his name is, who has written famous books on ants,
00:46:18.000 --> 00:46:26.000
basically believes ants are stupid, but it's simply because he investigated them in stupid ways
00:46:26.000 --> 00:46:32.000
that failed to look at their unique response to unique circumstances.
00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:41.000
So if a person doesn't look for a general phenomenon, naturally they're not going to find it.
00:46:41.000 --> 00:46:56.000
But if you look with scale for general behavior, then you're going to see things that are maybe of maximum importance.
00:46:56.000 --> 00:47:06.000
For example, when people are studying cancer, the genetic people don't look for field phenomena,
00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:09.000
and so they can't see them.
00:47:09.000 --> 00:47:18.000
But whenever someone looks for such a thing as a cancer field, they see that it's there.
00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:28.000
For example, the definitive cancer cells are surrounded by a field of precancerous cells,